Wednesday, October 30, 2013

The Musilanguage Model of Poetry

I recently came across these papers from 2000 and 2001 and 2006 demonstrating the neurological connections between music and language, suggesting the two were once one. I make the same argument in my 2004 dissertation, albeit, in ignorance of this article. I am happy to learn my conclusions had been confirmed. More, this confirms the neurological consilience that occurs when we hear rhythmic poetry.

Further, in the 2000 paper, Steven Brown observes that

music emphasizes sound as emotive meaning and language emphasizes sound as referential meaning.

One of the attractions of poetry is, of course, that it does both.

Coincidentally, the arguments in this short article about the biological paradoxes of music, is equally applicable to language, dance, storytelling, and poetry. So, too, his comments about musical autonomy in the West -- when something like music becomes its own spontaneous order, it continues to overlap with other social orders, but it also develops a pure core. The same is true of language, dance, storytelling and poetry -- we have self-referential language modern dance, metafiction, and self-referential poetry. Postmodern music, fiction, and poetry are a natural consequence of these artistic orders' full development as autonomous orders.